


little mischievous everything

by SyntheticRevenge



Category: The Mechanisms (Band)
Genre: Alcohol, Fluff and Angst, I wrote another very fragmented Mechs fic and we all have to live with that, Jonny D'ville sucks at romance, M/M, The Mechanisms-Typical Violence, the inherent homoeroticism of pulling your friend out of a sun, the summary makes this sound sexy it is Not sexy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-29
Updated: 2020-08-29
Packaged: 2021-03-07 02:40:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,326
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26169589
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SyntheticRevenge/pseuds/SyntheticRevenge
Summary: Jonny doesn’t make it easy to be gentle with him.
Relationships: Drumbot Brian & Jonny d'Ville, Drumbot Brian/Jonny d'Ville
Comments: 12
Kudos: 173
Collections: Brian Soup





	little mischievous everything

**Author's Note:**

> Look I just had such a good time writing my Nastya/Aurora fic that I decided to come back and inflict more of my totally scattered Mechs feelings on y'all. Hope you enjoy. Title's from Little Bulldozer by Kevin Devine, which is currently my only Jonny/Brian song.

Jonny doesn’t make it easy to be gentle with him. 

The first time Brian ever tries to dig a bullet out of his side (certainly very, very far from the last), he twitches and thrashes because he knows it makes everything more difficult. He laughs when Brian growls in frustration, mocks him, plays like he’s going to go still and then starts fucking wriggling again the second Brian thinks it’s safe to try again.

Eventually Brian decides fuckit. Switches himself over to EjM, endures the aggressive spine-shiver into blossoming migraine, and presses Jonny into the kitchen counter they use as an operating table so hard his bones crack.

Jonny goes quiet and still, even as Brian  _ finally _ pulls the bullet out. “I thought doctors weren’t supposed to do any harm,” he says, looking abjectly delighted as he energetically tries and fails to sit up. 

“I don’t give a shit about your bones, Jonny, they’ll heal.”

“So would the bulletwound.”

“Yeah. Around the bullet. About eighty percent of your weight at this point is probably leftover bullets your body fucking welcomed in.” Brian shakes his head, doesn’t look at Jonny, who’s still wickedly beaming. Flicks himself back to MjE.

“That’s one for Ivy.”

“We could maybe get them out with magnets,” Brian says.

“That sounds like a new and interesting kind of painful, I’m surprised Carmilla hasn’t already come up with it,” Jonny says, brightly. “You’re a trailblazer, Brian.”

“I hate that, thanks.”

“Anything for you,” Jonny says, winking. Brian really fucking hates him sometimes.

**

“I have a question,” Jonny says, eyes sparkling. The sensors built into Brian’s not-skin are picking up dangerous blood alcohol levels from Jonny’s breath and sweat and being, more intense as he sways closer. 

“Do you have a question or do you have a blowtorch? Because last time you said you had a question--” Brian says, and Jonny smirks and closes his eyes, looking briefly like a deeply satisfied cat.

“No,” he sighs. “Just a question this time, unfortunately.”

“Unfortunately,” Brian repeats, softly, snorting.

“You--you were  _ good _ before us, right? You know. Saving lives with your witchy doctor shit and all?”

“I like to think so, yeah. Is that the question? That’s--”

Jonny never lets anyone else finish sentences, ever. “So what makes someone want to be a hero? How--what fires in your head that--that makes you want to go out of your way to--” He trails off and sighs in frustration, pressing his face into his hands. “You know.”

“Why ask me?”

“No one else ever explained it in a way I understood,” Jonny says. “It’s important, y’know? Can’t tell a good story without a hero that makes fucking  _ sense _ , and you--you could help make things make sense, and…” 

He looks frustrated at his own incoherence. It’s sort of cute. Brian’s heart twinges a bit. He was already on EjM--have to be, to enjoy time with Jonny even remotely--so he lets himself make semi-meaningful eye contact when he says “I think it’s...seeing something broken and knowing you would do anything it took in the entire universe to make it whole and right again.”

“Oh,” Jonny says, eyes wide. Brian watches the subtext fly right over his head. “That’s good, I--I can work with that.”

“You don’t want to fix things?” Brian asks, idly, reflexively. He knows the answer. Besides, he’s not Marius, what the fuck good is psychoanalyzing Jonny D’Ville ever going to do?

Jonny snorts, tilting his head back. “Everything in this universe is so goddamned determined to be broken. Better to just shatter it than destroy yourself trying to hold it together.”

“But we can’t die.”

“You can destroy yourself without dying,” Jonny says, voice dark for a moment before he physically shakes it out like a wet dog. “Thank you for the insight, dear Drumbot.”

“Go to sleep, Jonny.”

“Make me,” Jonny says, waggling his eyebrows.

“--do you mean fuck you or kill you?” Brian asks, squinting in confusion.

“Dealer’s choice.”

Brian shakes his head, trying not to smile. “Goodnight, Jonny.”

“It never is, Brian, it never is.”

**

Jonny disintegrates at least once trying to pull Brian out of the sun he got himself stuck in, and at least it’s a new and interesting kind of death. It burns past the point of pain. Every nerve gets so overstimulated it just...stops. He just  _ stops _ . It’s calm, for fucking  _ once _ , and then it’s over, and then he reforms back into screaming agony, and the cycle starts again.

Time is meaningless. It’s all meaningless. Brian’s molten metal in his ashing hands. Eventually, somehow, they’re both back on the Aurora and both alive and Jonny realizes he’s missed Brian’s stupid patchy metallic face, and it frustrates him enough he gently stabs one of Nastya’s misplaced screwdrivers into his thigh.

“Took you long enough,” Brian says. 

“A little  _ gratitude _ would be nice,” Jonny says. “Didn’t have to save you from your extracurricular activities at all, considering how you left us.”

“Gods, don’t make this a  _ thing _ .”

“A  _ thing _ ? Am I making it a  _ thing _ ?” Jonny asks.

“Jonny, I’ve just been in a sun for a very fucking long time, and if you start passive-aggressively monologuing about how it’s ironic or whatever that I left you guys to try and help people and ended up allowing an entire space station full of people to be violently destroyed, I will end you.”

“Ooh, is that a promise?” Jonny asks, baring his teeth in a bright smile. “Also, do  _ not _ fucking offend me like that, Brian,  _ nothing _ I do is ‘passive’, I am fully aggressive.”

Brian sighs, heavily. “I don’t like you.”

“Join the club. We have special pins.”

“I missed you, though.”

“Fuck off,” Jonny says, snorting and making himself look away from Brian, because his heart is still searing from the sun, and it’s doing strange things to his insides. 

“No, I did,” Brian says. “When everything was sort of going to shit, I thought about you and how much you’d love it. You and your tragic endings. Besides, the violence got decent for a bit, and that always makes me think of you.”

“I missed you too,” Jonny mutters, before he can bite his tongue off to stop the words. He’s a broken machine that works out of order--he says things, and then decides whether they’re true or not.

The conclusion he comes to, without a  _ whole _ lot of deliberation, is...yes, yeah, he did miss Brian, he missed his stupid face and the echoes of eerie sad banjo through the halls of the ship and his calm strong hands and the way he actually thinks about the things he says rather than blurting the meanest and/or funniest thing he can think of in any given situation like the rest of them.

“Come here,” Brian says, softly, and Jonny bites his lip like a petulant kid. “Jonny, don’t make me beg you, I haven’t been touched in centuries and I don’t have the energy to get up and wander around the ship looking for someone else.”

Brian isn’t completely solid again yet, and he’s still definitely retained too much heat for human skin to handle, so Jonny burns himself down to the bone curling up against his side, but he thinks it’s sort of neat-looking as he taps skeletal fingers against Brian. 

It’s arrhythmic and at no particular tempo, just to piss off the Drumbot in him, but there’s not even a sigh of frustration, no irritated  _ Jonny _ , so he must be pretty fucking gone.

“Tell me the story,” Jonny says, eventually. “How’d it all happen?”

“Please don’t write about it yet, it’s still fresh.”

“You know we decide by vote, it’s  _ really _ not up to me.”

“But you’re the captain,” Brian says, smirking.

“Stop appealing to my vanity, you scoundrel, are you on EjM?” Jonny asks.

“If you can’t tell, does it matter?”

“Just tell the story, you rusty fucker.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! All feedback is really appreciated, especially since I........do not know how to Brian.  
> Find me on tumblr @witnesstotheend


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